Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August 2021 peak. Half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever in the global stock exchange history. Once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, Meta has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent.
Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230B last week. A record daily loss for a US firm. Its shares fell 26.4% after quarterly figures disappointed investors. Meta also said that Facebook's daily active users (DAUs) had dropped for the first time in its 18-year history and fell to 1.929B in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930B in the previous quarter.
In December 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sought to break up Meta and to unwind acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Unfortunately, Judge James E. Boasberg found that FTC had not plausibly supported its case, and thus could not proceed. Under the new chair Lina Khan FTC re-filed with more evidence and now the case has been approved for trial. But now TikTok is the new champion. In 2021, it was the most visited website in the world.